← Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
What Home Service Businesses NEED To Stop Missing Calls
00:49:45
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- [00:00]
A
We are here to build a business for the very, very long term. You know, we want to really help our customers challenge the status quo. You know, closing more deals, having happier customers, that is what drives your business success. And that's been the North Star for us since day one.
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B
So that like real core first customer was like the one man in a truck.
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A
Exactly. At least I think in home services, the businesses we work with are a lot more innovative than what the myth is.
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B
Welcome back. Owned and Operated. I'm your host, John Wilson. Today I'm joined by Jarina Kulya, the co founder of Quo, formerly OpenPhone. Today's a wide ranging conversation going from rebranding communication home service companies as they scale and how to continue to upgrade your tech stack. Thanks for joining and make sure you like and subscribe. Darina, welcome to Owned and Operated. It's awesome to have you on today.
- [00:55]
A
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about talking to you and being on the show.
- [01:00]
B
Yeah, this will be, this will be fun. I, I want to just, we'll do like a quick snippet on what you guys do and then you really served me up like a great topic right before we got on. So we're, we're gonna, we're gonna dive in. So yeah, how about you start us off with like, what do you guys, what do you guys do?
- [01:20]
A
Absolutely. So Quo, formerly known as Open Phone. We're a business phone solution for small businesses, startups and we really help you not just communicate with your customers. So all the things like calling, texting, but we really help you build stronger customer relationships so that you can make more money at the end of the day. We started this company about seven years ago, have grown a lot, serve over 90,000 customers and we think that one of the big problems for businesses is that they don't necessarily like, need more leads. They just need to make sure that the customers they have and the leads they are getting, they're really great at following up to lead and we want to help our customers be a lot better at serving their customers and growing faster.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, that's amazing. Right before we got on, you brought up an episode that I think just went live last night, which was, we did an episode with Rich Jordan, he's a good friend of mine on like rebranding and I think that like you guys are pretty far along. You're seven years in and you rebranded from Open Phone, which is kind of a fairly straightforward name. Unlike here's what we do to Quo and I'm Sure. A lot of questions. We just did this whole big episode from Rich of like, here's why, here's the philosophy. Like why? What's the philosophy?
- [02:49]
A
Listen, it's, it's. I've been asked many times recently, you know, we just did this about two months ago and 100% a very risky move and something that got a lot of people wondering, you know, if we're really crazy over here. The thing is. Well, first of all, let's start off. OpenPhone is an amazing name and I am so grateful for, you know, I think that when we got started it was like perfect name. I actually think we could not have found a better name for the company when we got started. The thing is that as communication is changing with, with AI, with a bunch of things, you know, we are here to build a business for the very, very long term. And you know, I think maybe right now it feels like a crazy, crazy decision, right? To go from open phone to dropping phone and sort of having a name that's more abstract like quo. But for us it is an opportunity to you know, be building for, for the very long run. I think that I was thinking about, you know, businesses, entrepreneurs starting companies in like 10 years, you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, whoever generation is going to be starting those businesses in 10 years. I mean, I don't know what's what the concept of phone, what it would actually be in 10 years. And we want to be very flexible and we want to have the opportunity to really shape, to shape that and not have the name sort of like really limit us. The other thing is that we want to be very different. I think. I actually wonder if in your episode Rich sort of was talking about it. Sometimes you actually really just need to be different and a lot of competition in our space. I don't want to be naming folks. They have names that are really descriptive and we wanted to kind of go away from that to hopefully have a name that we can shape like meaning around and, and that really stands out. I also think that Quo, you know, it's quo.com. it's a very short name.
- [04:54]
B
I mean three letter domain like makes sense. It felt to me like a challenging the status quo. I don't know if that was like a part of it, but like that was the vibe I got from it.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah, it is challenging the status quo. It is the new status quo. We want to be the, we want to be the way into which businesses communicate with their customers. Actually the name quo means in Latin by which. So we are the system by which businesses communicate with their customers. And actually, you know, folks might say, okay, well, like, it has nothing to do with phone. That's kind of the idea. I also, that's not a, you know, it's a feature, not a bug. I also will say that just for people who are really into brand and rebranding, we actually worked with an agency to help us come up with a name. Because if we did this ourselves, we probably couldn't. We've all been so used to the name open phone. So we had an agency go through the whole process to help us find a new name. And fun fact, the team in that agency that came up with the name Quo, they had no idea what they were naming. And I think that just shows you that sometimes knowing too much about what you do can be so limiting. You need that outside perspective. So, yeah, the wild idea, wild decision. But we are excited because it gives us so much room to grow. It gives us so many possibilities and we want to really help our customers challenge the status quo.
- [06:26]
B
Yeah, I've got to ask because I just came off another rebranding podcast episode. What's the cost of rebrand? Like, I mean, the domain name for a three letter URL, you don't have to name it, but it's gotta be like a lot. Plus, the.
- [06:43]
A
We got really lucky. I will tell you one thing which is kind of a fun fact, is that the domain'.com was way cheaper than what we paid for openphone.com. so let me just say that. Yeah.
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B
Is it six figures? Five or four?
- [07:02]
A
Definitely not four. Yeah, no, let's just say. Yeah, it's, you know, very.
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B
I mean, Quo's good. It's a good domain name. Like I would expect it to be a lot.
- [07:14]
A
We got very lucky. We got very lucky. And I think that the thing though is, you know, maybe going back to this idea of, you know, you did an episode on branding rebranding. I think a lot of it is what you make it. So as much as, you know, maybe now it still feels like, you know, a lot of customers tell me there are customers who tell me they love the new name. There are also customers, of course, who tell me they miss the old name. And I get it. We've been open phone for a long time. But the thing is that this is we're two months in the name. The brand is what you. It's the meaning that you give it and the work is just beginning. And I hope that we're here for a very long run. So we want to, over time Give it so much meaning. And I really hope that people, if they don't love it right now, it will really grow on them.
- [08:07]
B
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A
Yeah, for sure. I think that VoIP is a great way to put it. I mean technically we're still in that sort of industry. I think we're.
- [09:37]
B
So you just broadened scope.
- [09:39]
A
We. Yeah, we just, yeah, we want to. We've always been. I think that from the very beginning we never really honestly thought about it as, oh, we're going to start a VoIP product or a VoIP company. That was never, never the idea. The idea was always we want to help small businesses not lose customers. And frankly, this goes way back to. I think your audience will probably appreciate. My co founder, prior to working on this, was building software for contractors, invoicing software. And he found that when he was building that product, a lot of his customers were afraid to put their phone number on the invoice because they would be bombarded with calls and they wouldn't have someone to, to answer. And all the solutions in the space were just so clunky and you know, that was like one of the interesting insights that obviously if you are, you know, a contractor, you're working with clients, you're on the client side, like, you're there to do the work. If your phone rings, you probably don't want to like, pick it up in front of your client. But that means you're limiting yourself, right, from all the potential business that you will be getting. And you need that to keep the pipeline of clients going. And that was just such a, such a huge insight. And when we started this company, we never. I mean, technically we are voip, technically, you know, business phone telephony. We, we want to give you the business outcome of growing your business. That is what we're after. That's also why I think the name Like Quo helps us show that we are here to deliver the business outcome. We're here less just to be like a channel of communication, because communication, you can talk to customers in any channel you want. It's a bit of a commodity. But the business outcome that is closing more deals, having happier customers, that is what drives your business success. And that's been the North Star for us. So since day one.
- [11:42]
B
Yeah, I, I think that makes sense. We. I know on one hand, like, phones aren't something that I like going to just like the baseline of. Like, here's why we started. Like, I'm just going to give a snippet on like voiceover IP products. It. It's like needed, right? Like, there's not much of a choice. You need something and ideally you need something that gives you data. And I, it's just been. It's fascinating how often this like, backbone of your industry comes up in conversations that I'm in, like group chats or, or whatever. I. You didn't name any competitors, but I will name a few competitors that people are having negative experiences with. So like Dial Pad comes up in like half of the convert. Like group chats that I'm in because shockingly, I don't know why, but Dial Pad seems to crash once a week. Uh, cause at least my group chats tell me that we don't use dial. Um, but I'm it for like such a backbone of the business. Like, it has to work. It just has to work. And it's. Yeah, I, I think it. I would imagine that that's a big thing to overcome and I can see like, where it fits in to like small businesses as they. Like, one, is someone picking up the phone? Are we delivering good value? And two, like, is it consistent and.
- [13:00]
A
Is it working 100% and yeah, I think that is obviously like the backbone, like it has to work. It's. I think that's like non negotiable. But then on top of it, I think there is so much value that any product, you know, I think that there is still so much value that is not delivered. If you think about it, you have so much insights in those conversations. We have customers that run their businesses on top of quo, where their calls and messages, all of that history, all of their customer interactions are in the platform. And what I'm really excited about and happy to tease, maybe some things we're working on, but I'm really excited about giving you as the business owner, as the operator, giving you really unique insights about how your team is talking to customers. What, what they're actually saying. I just the other day connected my quo workspace to Claude and I, you know, we use quo, obviously I connected our sales number and I started asking Claude, like, tell me what are the top 10 objections that we can overcome. It took me, you know, a couple of minutes. And right now that's sort of like the workflow. You know, you kind of, you can connect Kuo to ChatGPT to Claude. Yeah, of course we want to bring more of these insights directly in the product as. But I think that as the owner, if you know that, listen, if you know that your team is maybe not able to overcome a certain objection without a solution like this, you would be kind of like flying blind. You actually don't know what's the blocker to your business growth. But we can give you those insights and really show you that, hey, maybe this team is crushing it because they're able to do this versus the other team and needs more training, needs more coaching.
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B
You said that you put it into Claude and it served you back. The objections that were challenging.
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A
Oh, yeah, yeah.
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B
Like what, what were the objections that were hard to.
- [15:03]
A
Well, I, yeah, I think some of the objections, some of the objections that we saw where, you know, a very classic one, is that, you know, we don't support desk phones, for example. Our solution is hard.
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B
Oh, sure, yeah.
- [15:15]
A
We don't, we don't support.
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B
I'm, I'm shocked that that's still an objection. I mean, in 2025, I feel like.
- [15:20]
A
In some industries, in some industries, maybe not home services. I think home services, you know, you guys are ahead of the head of the curve.
- [15:29]
B
We're now ahead of the curve in 2025.
- [15:32]
A
I love home services. You guys are actually pushing the boundaries in many ways. So not in home Services. But we also, you know, we have clients in other industries and sometimes when it's things like maybe healthcare or legal, in some of those cases, it's a lot of change management. Right. And it's sort of like what we need to do is perhaps instead of just like cool, like we don't support desk phones, we help you understand why and what is the benefit. And again, we want to be building for the businesses like five, ten years from now. And I think that there is just so much to build that never say never listen. Maybe I regret saying this and we support desk phones in a year, but, but we want to be really future looking and help you solve the challenges and make your business future proof as well.
- [16:23]
B
Yeah, technology adoption I think is really interesting. I remember you mentioned Twitter before we got on, so I'm assuming you're somewhat active in that space. But I remember in 2019, 20, 20, 2021, a lot of the conversation on Twitter was like, go buy a plumbing business and H Vac business. You're competing against people that are using a fax machine. And I'm just like, where are those guys at? Because that is not how plumbing and H vac works. You're competing against like the most funded competitors in the U.S. yeah, I also.
- [16:58]
A
By the way, I still hear that sentiment and I do wonder where it's coming from because you know, you know, we serve a wide range of customers and I think sometimes, you know, when I share that we serve small businesses, people assume that like, oh cool, like you know, you are ripping and replacing pen and paper and facts and maybe a spreadsheet. And frankly, I think that is not the case. We see, actually I'm sure we're going to talk about AI because everyone does these days, but I'm seeing people really experimenting. I'm seeing businesses building their own workflows. They're not just even buying software off the shelf, they're connecting things, connecting tools. So sometimes building their own tooling. Like we're kind of living in crazy times. So I think that at least I think in home services the businesses we work with are a lot more innovative than what the myth is.
- [17:58]
B
Yeah, I think so. And I like, we're, we've designed a number of like internal only use apps using like lovable, like it's kind of crazy what you can do. We like, we were shopping, this was like six months ago, but we were shopping for a fleet management software to like manage the backbone of our fleet. Like how do you tag repairs, how do you track VINs, how do you do all this stuff? Kind of a complicated software and it was going to be 20 grand a year and it was like, hey, hold my beer. And we put it together on lovable in like a day. Like, it's crazy. And I'm hearing more and more people in this space. Yeah, exactly to your point. Doing this experimenting and like figuring out how to drive this 100%.
- [18:41]
A
And I think that this is what I think is so fun. Right. I also know there are people who have like left tech to join, you know, to buy a business, like you said. Right. They're kind of coming in from maybe tech industry and sort of applying those principles. I think that's, to me, I think it's really fun and I think that we can, we can all like learn from, from what they're doing. So it will be really interesting. Maybe we can come back to look back on this conversation like years from now and say, okay, people are just building their own software stack from scratch.
- [19:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think it's probably obvious to you. But similar to, it's hard to disrupt the plumber in the home. I feel like for a technology company, being the backbone, being the voip gives you a lot more control than like the fleet management software. I just talked about displacing, like, I'm not going to go design a voip program. Right. Like, and I think that like you're, you're sort of this backbone that insulates you from a lot of the drama.
- [19:49]
A
Well, we have a lot of complexity. I think that maybe something too. There is a lot of, there is a lot of complexity to our business and a lot of nuance to being able. You know, we have a really big engineering team. We have, you know, very. When you look at what we do and sort of like our, the depth of product development. Yeah, it takes, it takes a lot to be able to do what we do now. Things like integrations, for example. Right. We, we've released our API. Um, we did this like last year at this point. Yeah, last year. And we've, we have people who can build things on top of our platform, which I think is amazing. But of course, like the backbone, the core, all the clients working on all devices. Keep in mind that like a lot of our customers really need. And for them it's not about just having the app on their computer. They are out and about. We actually started out as a mobile app. So our, our iOS app that was actually our very first thing we built years ago. So we started as an iOS app and then we expanded into Desktop, web, everywhere. Which I think that like real core.
- [21:06]
B
First customer was like the one man in a truck in my mind guy. Interesting.
- [21:14]
A
Well, I'm telling you, my co founder, you know, he was building, you know, he was building tools for contractors and you know the first like the first version of Kuo at that time called OpenPhone was, was just an iOS app and we got a lot of customers and a lot of demand just for that. And I just remember how, because you know, for that customer, like to your point, if you're a contractor, one man show type of thing, right?
- [21:43]
B
Doing there's not a great solution. Like even today, yeah, even today. Like I hear people, I have a friend and he runs like a small plumbing company local to me and it's like it's, it's either carry two cell phones or like there wasn't a good solution.
- [21:58]
A
To your point, you can send him.
- [21:59]
B
Quote.Com well, I will, you know, but, but yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good point. Pain point. And I think on one hand I feel like, oh, that's not a pain point anymore. But I can definitely like, you know the guy that is coming out to clean my like upholstery tomorrow, like he's a one man show and I'm sure he doesn't like me. Text his personal number probably.
- [22:21]
A
Here's actually something that is kind of interesting because going back to this idea that and you know, we're kind of going back in the day, you know, when we got started we started as an iOS app, obviously built. Now we are available on all devices. There is. We support teams, you know, we have teams of hundreds of people using us sort of like together. What's very interesting is that the kind of like a problem with that is when you're starting out and you might be just, it's just you. Here is the limiting mindset. Limiting mindset is that, oh, that's fine, I'll use my cell phone. That's okay. It's just me. Who cares. I love my business, I love my customers. Text me anytime, which is great. But here's what happens. At some point you're not going to be able to keep up. You're going to want to hire an ea, a va, an ops person. You're going to need to, if you want to scale that business, you want to be able to not be like the blocker. And, and what happens, and I see this all the time, is that people decide like, cool, I'm just gonna hire someone to help me manage my business. But the customers are still calling and texting the owner. So their personal phone becomes like they actually, they have sometimes even handed over to their ops person. And I think that's just such a, you know, we see this all the time. For me, I always recommend like, listen, just get a, get a separate phone number. Of course I will tell people to use quo. But even if you get it somewhere else, it's better than having your personal number become like that limiting factor so you can delegate. You can't really scale your business. It's something people don't realize. They only realize it after and they wish they did it differently.
- [24:07]
B
Yeah. Wait. My anecdote is we've bought nine other companies and in every single instance, the owner's phone number, their cell, their personal cell phone number gets leads. So we have to acquire the personal cell phone number when we acquire the business. Otherwise we lose leads. So it's sort of like, you know, cell phone numbers to me at, at this point are almost like Social Security numbers. Like I've had the same cell phone number for like I think 19 years. So it'd be very odd to change it. And people feel. But like, yeah, it'll. You'll have to sell your personal cell phone number in a business transaction because it's getting leads. Yeah.
- [24:47]
A
And it probably, I mean, just think of the pain of that because it probably.
- [24:51]
B
You have to, you have to update all your contacts. It's a. Yeah. Pain. Big pain.
- [24:55]
A
Oh yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. No, I think it's like a simple thing to do. To me, it's like, it's like getting, I don't know, it's like getting a business email address. Right. You start a business if you're really serious about it. Like don't use your Gmail. Right. It's pretty simple. Get a separate email, get a business phone number. It's the basics. But yeah, but obviously there's so much that happens after. And I think that, yeah, we're excited to not only solve this problem, but of course then help our customers as they scale. A lot of other problems come up.
- [25:32]
B
Are you tired of paying money on leads that don't convert? With Paypercall IO, you only pay for a lead when you're free. Phone rings. No junk leads, no bots and no guesswork. Just real calls from real customers. Pay per call IO helped our company achieve a 5 times ROI in just 60 days. If you're ready for marketing that actually delivers, head to pay per call IO and book a free demo today. That's Pay per call IO get more calls. Not excuses. Click the link in the description to get started. Yeah, so I, yeah, I think it sounds like you guys have a, a lot of visibility into like that, that inflection point for these customers of like, hey, I'm a contractor, I'm stepping into the office or I'm hiring my first csr, I'm building a call center team. Can you give me any, like, perspective what it's like from your angle to look at these companies as they expand their office?
- [26:26]
A
Well, a couple of things. First of all, people do this too late. I think that the one thing that I see all the time is that. And I get it. You know, as a founder, I totally get it. I think that most people who start a business, they care very deeply about their customers and they are very, very. They think that they are the only one who can be serving their customers. I get the feeling. I felt the same way to a degree. But you know, they just do it too late. Right? So whenever you hire your csr, that first person you bring on to help you serve your customers, whenever you do it, it's already too late. So that's one thing to consider. You probably want to do it right before you feel the pain. Because when you feel the pain, the truth is your customers already feel the pain because you're not responding fast enough. I mean, we talk about speed to lead. If you are a sole business owner operator, you have to wear way too many hats. So being sure that you're picking up, responding to calls, you're not letting those leads go to your competitor, that is non negotiable. So one trend we see is people do it when it hurts, but you kind of have to do it sort of like before it hurts so bad. And also hiring, right, like when you want to hire, I mean, you know, we are in a, you know, we're in a different space, we're in tech, but we see this as well, that the moment, you know, you need to hire, there is the whole recruiting cycle. You want to find the right person who is, who is great for your business, who is the right fit for the team. And it takes a while. So. So I think that is one insight. People do it a bit too late. And the other second piece we see is that when they do it, sometimes folks sort of feel relief. They're like, oh great, we just hired maybe two CSRs or an OPS person. They're like very excited, but they step out too fast. And what that means is they great, this person is going to be handling calls, amazing. But they don't really think about cool. How are they talking about the company? How are they positioning the services? Back to the idea, like, are they handling objections? Have you, as the owner, done a good job really training them, enabling them to be, you know, to be talking about what you do the same way that, that you would have. And this is where I'm so excited about things we're building because we want to give you visibility into those calls, into those conversations. So you say, hey, like these kind of calls we need to train the team better on, or these kind of calls we seem to not be able to book. And I think this is where it's still a black box. And I think that as the business owner, you need to don't, don't like, disconnect from that the moment you hire your first or second person.
- [29:31]
B
Yeah, I think that's the phrase I think is delegation versus abdication. Where I think, you know, people are like, oh, I delegated this. But delegating is like, yeah, setting a framework, setting KPIs, setting targets. And abdication is, hey, you got this. I'm, you know, like, I'm, I will never look at this again. Which I, I would assume that probably is a big problem with. Sounds like what the customer base is because, like, they're totally slammed at all times. So they finally got someone to take over, like this challenging thing, like keeping up with the administrative burden every day. I would imagine they do just. Yeah, yeet. As fast as they can. Yeah.
- [30:12]
A
I think there's also a question of, you know, listen, I think that, of course it varies a little bit based on perhaps the size of the business and how, how fast they're growing, like, what, what tools they use. Because, because frankly, again, if you think about various ways to solve the problem we solve, like, one thing you could do is you could, you know, you could perhaps get like various phone numbers or separate phones for your, for your team. You could use one of our competitors, which, listen, you know, I always, you know, I'm not going to say anything bad about our competitors, but the truth is that not all the products out there actually give you the level of insight you need. So it's very easy to kind of like set it and forget it. But I think that for your business to scale, you are really missing those key insights to say, hey, are we staffing the team the right way? Do we have the right hours of coverage? Even the basics? How many missed calls are we getting? Because you'd be surprised. You have a Phone number on your website, you have a phone number on your Google profile. Sure, you have a tool set up, you have your team, you're all set. But are they missing a lot of calls? Maybe you're getting calls at 5pm after hours and you don't have anyone to respond, and you just don't know that you need to, like, to make changes to the way you staff.
- [31:36]
B
Yeah, I think I want to expand into data a little bit. I know when we. This was probably three years ago for us, but we started exactly this journey of like, where are we missing? And it was because a friend of mine, a fellow contractor, told me I was missing calls. And, and it's kind of funny because, like, I'll tell that to people now. And like, no matter who it is, no matter who's saying who, what to who, everyone's like, I don't miss a call at all. I've never, I've never missed a call. What are you talking about? And they like, very like, you know, defensive mode. Because I think they're like, they think, oh, I put a lot of energy into this. Or like, Mary Beth in the office, like, picks up everyone, or like, you know, whatever the sort of mindset is. But we missed a ton. Like, it was, it was shocking. And I know there's a joke of like, oh, just pick up your phone. We were shocked at how complicated just picking up your phone is. It was, it was, you know, because again, that's one of those Twitter jokes is like, yeah, all these. All you have to do as a plumber is pick up your phone. It's like, okay, here's the sound bite.
- [32:47]
A
You have the phone.
- [32:48]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's a good, It's a good sound bite, isn't it? But, you know, we, when we started looking into it, it's like, okay, so On Monday, from 8 to 9, we get 300 phone calls. Then for the next two hours, we get 20 total phone calls. Then at noon, we get more. And then at 4:30 to 6, we get more. And it's sort of these, like, very peak and valley troughs where it, it gave us a ton of insight into staffing shifts, whether or not we support our team with like, external call centers or external tools. And, and, and it was a. It was. It sounds so dumb because it, Everyone makes it sound so easy. Just pick up your phone. But it was very complicated. It was a very complicated problem to solve. An expensive problem to solve that is right after solving it, we, we grew like 50% from, you know, air quotes just Picking up the phone. But it took about a million dollars of investment to just pick up the phone between like staffing and call centers and tools. And it took a lot. It was kind of incredible.
- [33:58]
A
Yeah, but you see, I think it's like all the redundancies that you have to create in place. And going back to your point, if you have one hour when you're getting so many calls but then it gets really flatlined.
- [34:08]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:09]
A
Flatline. How you know, obviously you need external.
- [34:12]
B
Help and we were staffing by the day, so the idea was, okay, we get 80 phone calls a day. Okay, well that's not enough information. You actually need to know by the hour and sometimes by the minute. Of like when are those 80 phone calls coming in? Because it could be that 30 of them are from 7 to 8am and you only have one CSR working, which was our. So it's sort of. Yeah, it's, I, I think it was interesting. So the extra data like just totally agreeing like it was really formative for us as we sort of grew from that 10 to 20 million range. It was. The call center was our biggest project.
- [34:48]
A
You see what's so interesting too is like you're talking about, and this is what gets me so excited is so sounds like for you, like you were fairly far along when this, when you, when you started.
- [34:58]
B
We were an eight figure business when we started really diving into this problem. Like we had looked at it, glanced at it, but yeah, we were doing $10 million a year which is like, you know, that's bigger than some, smaller than others.
- [35:13]
A
No, no, no. I mean it sounds incredible but just think about this. Imagine what gets me so excited is that I want a business when they're doing 50k a year. Like I want them to, I want them to have this data right away. Because, because I think that, and this is obviously you guys like with, at the stage you're at, you're at like you said this was a massive project. You invested so much into it. I'm sure you had help across the board to do this. Our goal is to give these powerful tools to every business. So they, as they're getting started, they get on the right foot and they see this right away. We do have the same. The dashboard you're describing I can see on our business when we're getting a lot of calls also helps with things like messaging. We do a ton of sms and you know, you're like, hey, like you know we get super, super crazy busy early hours of PST and that also you Know, that is definitely kind of relevant because we know kind of how our customer base is spread, so we know we need to staff for those hours. But. Yeah, but I think what you mentioned, it's like having those redundancies. I also wonder if this is when we talk a little bit about AI, because, because listen, there's one solution there. If you really don't want any missed calls, you can have AI as a level of defense. Maybe it's not the immediate layer of defense, but if nobody is picking up, if your team is slammed, what do you do? Do you let it go to voicemail or do you let it go to an AI agent? And I'm sure you know my answer there. But I mean that's like a, that's a question that's interesting.
- [36:58]
B
Yeah, I think it's a no brainer, at least in this, in my section of the industry. It's kind of a no brainer now. But you know, a couple of years ago it was these external call centers or we had utilized overseas staffing like we still do. But at the time that was a big part of our solution was when we first started diving into our data. We went from I think four or five people in call center because again we were like doing this by the day. So if we get 100 calls a day and 20 calls each or something like that now it's, I think we get a thousand phone calls a day and tens of thousands of texts. I have no idea. Like it's, it's a ridiculous amount and. But we kept overflowing the external call centers so like they also couldn't take on the demand. So we ended up beefing up overseas staffing to like 10 to 15 overseas staffing and like building our own external call center and then pairing that with AI. And obviously it's changed a lot over the last few years what it looks like. But yeah, it was a tremendous undertaking, definitely. Oh man.
- [38:04]
A
Well, you see, I think the, I'm so curious to see how it, like how it evolves because the other day I was just thinking like maybe still right now it's still the early days and people think of AI as your, that layer of defense. Like cool. Like this team can't take it. This team can take it. AI is better than voicemail. But as things are getting better, as the models are getting so much, so much more accurate.
- [38:32]
B
So I see just, I see two distinct camps from the people I talk to. So one camp and I don't know which is right, like, and I don't know that anybody does. But like one camp is human is now a differentiator, at least in plumbing, H Vac electric. In other industries potentially not. But plumbing H Vac electric is a developed technology, technologically developed industry. So human is now becoming the differentiator. Probably same with pizza. Like if I call the pizza place that's like half a mile away from my house, they have gluten free pizza, gotta get it there. It's AI. So like and they always tell me they don't have gluten free so it's kind of annoying. So humans are differentiator and on the other side of that is let's go AI first because we can. So AI first is, I mean there's companies that are nine figure revenue trade businesses that historically that would have required 50 to 70 CSRs like 24 months ago, that would have required 50 to 70 CSRs that now have three like it. The difference is so stark. So yeah, you've got human first which like hey, this is a differentiator. Let's like make customers happy, let's do all that stuff. And you have hey, let's like, let's drive efficiency. Can we do this with as much AI as possible? Like what's your customer base like looking and feeling like?
- [40:01]
A
So our customer base. So one just for context, you know, we launched our agent, our voice agent. Now it actually was earlier this year, it actually hasn't been that long. So since we've launched our voice agent, I would say that we are seeing pockets of customers that are diving in big time. And then there are obviously pockets of customers like you're mentioning where they're just letting it play out. The one thing that I like to think about is that no matter what camp you're in, the truth is that our data, we've looked at the data, our data shows that our own AI agent is three times better than voicemail.
- [40:44]
B
So when we look at our.
- [40:46]
A
Yes, when we look at that, I think that's a no brainer. Now I think the rest kind of depends on your business. It kind of depends on obviously for our own AI agent we are constantly like we're shipping updates all the time, we're constantly making it better. So it can do a lot more things. But I feel like it sort of depends on the job profile. When you're hiring a csr really what are the things they do on the phone. The truth is if, if your CSRs are just answering very simple questions and that's kind of it, maybe you outsource to a call center and that call center, all they do is just like basic questions. And let me get back to you, then AI can do that and maybe can do that even better. But if your CSRs are doing very, they're deeply trained and there's a lot of things they do on the phone, then perhaps there is a little bit more time that's needed. So I think it kind of depends on your use case and the complexity of what you expect for the caller to be able to get over the phone. I would just say that frankly, for me, the way I think about it is what makes a better customer experience. So I think that's like our lens is we want to get you to deliver the best customer experience you can provide. So that's like what we're optimizing for.
- [42:09]
B
A lot of home service companies rely on referrals and they just don't have a great way to manage them. Most customers are pretty happy to recommend you, but without reminders or tracking, those referrals kind of disappear. So Referrer Pro helps keep that from happening. It automates referral collection, attribution and payouts so your customers actually follow through and you can focus on the work that matters. Referral leads convert faster, cost less, and help your business grow without buying more ads. You can see how it works and book a demo@ReferPro.com or through the link in our show. Notes mention owned and operated for 20% off and a discounted onboarding. Because most people are willing to refer you, they just need a little help remembering. Okay, I've got some quick fire questions for you. I have four in front of me. First, one, what is one communication process that contractors fix too late?
- [42:59]
A
I really think that it's the, the handoff between like sales, sales and sort of like implementation or delivery. It's just like so much information gets lost if you don't take notes. If you don't have a tool that helps, you just have that. It's just a mess.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah, I can confirm that that is a nightmare. And we still don't totally have it solved, despite how far along we are. What is one thing that most owners are getting wrong about scaling revenue?
- [43:30]
A
I think it's the two parts here. The first part is not hiring a team around you soon enough, like doing it too late. And then the second part is when you finally do, you step out too early so you feel the pain, you are ready to hire. And then you get excited and you just remove yourself entirely. When what you actually know about the business, the service, everything you do, the reason why customers buy. That's actually the knowledge your team needs to be effective at both selling and of course, supporting customers. So too. Too late, too early.
- [44:07]
B
What do you think of email as a channel?
- [44:10]
A
Listen, I love email. I know we don't support it right now. We, you know, I don't want to do any spoilers here, but I think email is a great channel. It's very different than obviously like, you know, we support voice and text. I think email is a bit slow though. I think it's a bit slow and I think that email inboxes are cluttered. Just a mess. Yeah. So to break through someone's email inbox you actually have to be very creative these days. So yes, I think that as a channel, it depends what you're using it for. But marketers have ruined it. Perhaps.
- [44:51]
B
That's funny. Call or text? Which is better?
- [44:54]
A
Both. I think that I'm more of a text person, to be honest. Like when I look at my quo stats, I just text all the time, you know, so I'm personally more of a text person. But I think both because there's very different reasons for, you know, when someone needs like a quick conversation, you can have a quick three minute call. That removes the need for like a million.
- [45:20]
B
Yes. Hours of text. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:22]
A
Going back and forth. But then if you are in a lot of meetings and if you are, I don't know, out and about and doing a lot of things, sometimes a quick text works better. So it depends. But I do actually think businesses are not like, I think text is still very underrated. Businesses don't lean into it enough. Still, people still sometimes assume that we just do calls. I'm like, no, no. Texting is a massive part of what we do. And I also think those businesses that use text, they have to be a little bit more thoughtful not to be spammy. So those are some of my quick things on text.
- [45:58]
B
Text is interesting. I think one of the harder problems that we've seen and I personally experience this now maybe I need to personally get on quo like for myself, but I. What I've personally experienced is like shared inbox problems and I think that's what businesses struggle with, with text is like, well, how do you do it? How do you share the inbox where I personally need it? Which I think is kind of funny is like I am in meetings most days, most of my day, most days. So a lot happens just like in text on my phone and it is hard to loop in my ea or it's hard to loop in my Team. So, like, I almost want a shared box inbox for me personally, because my life is like mostly done via text now.
- [46:46]
A
I. I know someone who can set you up with Quo.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
- [46:50]
A
It's amazing. And I think the piece you're describing that is actually, you asked me previously about our inflection points as a business.
- [46:57]
B
Yeah.
- [46:58]
A
Which brought me back to that question for a second. One of the biggest things that we launched that like, you can kind of look at our, our revenue and our customers. And it's like a before and after. When we launched, ability to have a shared number for texting and calling where you can do what you're saying. Right. When you have multiple people behind the scenes. The cool thing about it, which, which is like what our customers love is that when they, for example, I text you, let's say I'm your client, I text you. And you are in meetings, you are doing, you're busy. But maybe your EA or someone else has access to that inbox and response. That person doesn't necessarily know there's people behind the scenes. People really love the fact that it's a very productive environment behind the scenes happening. But to your customer, it's like you're responding.
- [47:49]
B
No. Yeah. I think that's amazing. And I think even this specific use case of assistant attached to a phone number is a hell of a use case. My sister just did this and she's a real estate agent and she texted me and she's like, hey, there's now shared number, like shared inbox with me and my ea. And I'm like, yeah, that's. That is amazing. I should have done that two years ago.
- [48:08]
A
Listen, you know who to talk to. But I also think that, you know, the same sort of use case, like, the same use case actually applies when you, when you have like going back to the idea that businesses are still.
- [48:21]
B
In some ways manual and.
- [48:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's the fact that, you know, you have your, you know, even, even this idea that like, consumers sometimes don't know they can text you. So if you let them know, it's an option. And if you have team behind the scenes sharing that number to do customer service or, you know, help with scheduling, people, people love it. I mean, I was just, I just got a text message from, you know, coordinating. We need someone to come in for pest control. And it's a text message. If they called me, there is not a chance I would respond because I'm in meetings. But texting, you know, I can respond.
- [49:00]
B
Quickly and just so much time this was awesome. I appreciate you coming in, coming on today. This was a ton of fun. I feel like we covered a bunch of really good stuff.
- [49:08]
A
Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.
- [49:10]
B
If people want to get ahold of you, it sounds like quo.com quo.com.
- [49:15]
A
That'S right. Yeah. I'm also on Twitter. I mean, that is my personally, I'm on Twitter probably a little too much. So Dorina Coolia on Twitter and quo.com, sign up. Also. I'm Dorinao.com if anyone has questions, ideas, feedback. Super open to hearing from customers. Potential customers, Anyone.
- [49:40]
B
Amazing. Thank you for coming on today.
- [49:43]
A
Thank you so much.